Economy · Business
Tim Cook: the man who made Apple 13 times bigger (and who nobody took seriously)
On 1 September he stopped running Apple. He took it over with revenue of $108 billion a year and left it at $416 billion. This is what he decided, what worked and what did not.
On 1 September 2026, Tim Cook stopped being the chief executive of Apple. The company announced it on 20 April: John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, took over, and Cook became executive chairman. It is the first change of chief executive since Cook himself replaced Steve Jobs in 2011. And he left with a label stuck to him that deserves a second look: the grey manager, an administrator without his predecessor’s vision or charisma, the man nobody took seriously as the successor to Jobs.
Cook never had Jobs’s charisma and never unveiled a product that changed the world. But in fifteen years he multiplied Apple’s revenue by 3.8, its profit by 4.3 and its stock market value by 13; he turned services into a business worth more than $100 billion and broke the dependence on Intel. He also absorbed lawsuits, fines and the first big sales warning in some seventeen years, and along the way he lost a car and missed the boat on artificial intelligence. This is the record, in figures and without adjectives.
Apple under Cook, in figures
Apple’s fiscal year, 2011-2025. The three metrics, one below the other.
Revenue
Net profit
Market capitalisation
Source: SEC/EDGAR, Apple Inc. 10-K 2011-2025 (CIK 0000320193); Macrotrends AAPL (market capitalisation, anchors Aug 2011 and Aug 2026, to be cross-checked against the 10-K).
What he inherited, in figures
When Cook took over in August 2011, Apple had annual revenue of $108,249 million and made a profit of $25,922 million. It was worth about $350 billion on the stock market. Services (iTunes, the newborn App Store, software) brought in barely $9 billion. It was already a huge company, the company of the iPhone 4, but with almost every egg in one basket: the handset.
The decisions that really were his
The first was technical and risky: in 2020 he broke with Intel and set Apple to designing its own chips, the Apple Silicon family, the M series. They define the Mac today and give it an efficiency lead its rivals are still chasing. The second was about the business model: squeezing the huge user base with paid subscriptions (Apple Music in 2015, TV+ in 2019, iCloud, Arcade, Fitness+) until a $9 billion corner of the company became its second pillar. The third was about positioning: turning privacy into a selling point (“What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone”) and, in 2021, giving users a button to block ad tracking, a decision that hit Meta head-on. And a fourth, quieter one: diversifying the supply chain away from China, above all towards India.
Cook never had Jobs’s charisma and never unveiled a product that changed the world. But in fifteen years he made Apple thirteen times bigger on the stock market.
The crises he steered through, the losses included
Cook inherited the patent war with Samsung and closed it in 2018. In 2016 he stood up to the FBI, which demanded a back door to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone, and refused. In 2017 batterygate broke: Apple admitted it was slowing down old iPhones without telling anyone (to protect the battery, it said), and ended up paying a settlement of up to $500 million in the US and fines in Europe (€25 million in France, €10 million in Italy). In January 2019 it cut its revenue forecast for the first time in some seventeen years: it warned the market it would sell less than promised, mostly because iPhone sales had stalled in China. In 2020 it shut factories for the pandemic and months later broke records. And on the regulatory front the blows keep landing: the Epic Games case (2021) and the EU Digital Markets Act (2024) forced it to open up the App Store, and the US Department of Justice lawsuit is still running. Hanging over all of it is the Google cheque, some $20 billion a year to be the default search engine, which depends on an antitrust ruling now under appeal.
What he did not pull off
Two things got away from him. The car: almost a decade and billions of dollars in Project Titan, which Apple cancelled in 2024 without ever showing anything. And artificial intelligence: Apple arrived late, the rebuilt Siri slipped, and the company has had to lean on outsiders while its rivals ran. There is a caveat, though. Apple is almost never first (it did not invent the MP3 player, or the smartphone, or the smartwatch), but it usually arrives second and does it better, polishing and popularising what others sketch out. The question with AI is whether this time the delay is too big. Which is exactly the problem Ternus has inherited.
What he left behind
In 2025 Apple had revenue of $416,161 million and made a profit of $112,010 million. Services are above $100 billion and are the second pillar after the iPhone. In fifteen years: revenue up 3.8 times, profit 4.3 times, stock market value 13 times. The grey-manager label he arrived with does not survive those figures: the man many wrote off as an administrator with no spark left a company bigger, more diversified and less dependent on a single product than the one he was handed (though he passed the challenge that levels everyone, AI, to his successor unsolved).
Cook did not change the world with a product. But at this scale, managing well is a form of strategy.
The question Ternus has inherited is not how to sell more iPhones, but whether Apple reaches the next wave in time. The same wave that, for the first time in fifteen years, got away from Cook.
Sources
- Apple Newsroom, 20 Apr 2026 (announcement of the Cook to Ternus handover): “John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026”. Primary.
- Apple Newsroom, 26 Aug 2024 (Maestri to Parekh as chief financial officer, effective 1 January 2025) and 8 Jul 2025 (Williams to Khan as chief operating officer). Primary: they are what supports the claim that the 2026 handover is the first change of chief executive since 2011, not the first at the top of the company.
- SEC/EDGAR, Apple Inc. 10-K 2011-2025 (CIK 0000320193). Primary (revenue and profit figures).
- Macrotrends AAPL (revenue, profit, market capitalisation; cross-checked against the 10-K). Secondary.
- Our own calculation. Apple does not publish the three multipliers: they come from dividing figures that are in this piece. Revenue by 3.8 ($108,249 million to $416,161 million), profit by 4.3 ($25,922 million to $112,010 million) and stock market value by 13 (about $350 billion in August 2011 to $4.57 trillion, that is $4,572,790 million, on 7 August 2026: the two verified anchors in Chart 1).
- What the 13 times measures. Market capitalisation, meaning the size of the company. It is not shareholder return, which is a different magnitude and one this piece neither calculates nor publishes.
- Declared gap. The market capitalisation ranking has been dropped from the text: the three companies move every day and the piece cannot hold a stable order without checking it every trading session. The only capitalisation figure left is the one in Chart 1, with its closing date in plain sight.
- Batterygate: settlement in the US (up to $500M) and fines in France (€25M) and Italy (€10M).
- Epic Games v. Apple (2021), the EU Digital Markets Act (2024), the US Department of Justice lawsuit and the case over the default search deal with Google.